VnutZ on OmniNerd

Human Behavior in Survival Situations - Article

VnutZ — Fri Mar 19 13:26:20 -0500 2010

Some behavioral researchers recently made some interesting conclusions regarding human behavior for survival. They looked at survival statistics for two ill-fated ships, the Titanic and the Lusitania. Each ship sank within three years of each other carrying approximately the same number of passengers and with a nearly identical survival rate of 67%. The difference between the two was how long it took the vessel to sink; the Titanic went down in just under three hours while the Lusitania sank in eighteen minutes. The researchers were curious if there would be a commonality between the two with regards to who survived and based their analysis on a multitude of factors like passenger class, age, marital status, children, etc. They expected to find that a propensity for women and children to be granted lifeboat access with the greatest casualties in the middle-aged, single men down in steerage. Instead, they found nearly the exact opposite on the Lusitania and came to the conclusion that in a short span of time, self-preservation nearly trumps all notions of chivalry whereas with a long enough timespan to “calm down,” people begin behaving by social norms again regardless of circumstance.

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1024bit RSA Encryption Broken - Article

VnutZ — Thu Mar 18 09:57:19 -0500 2010

RSA is pretty much the de facto name in public key encryption. They’ve long held open challenges to programmers to crack their keys going back to 1977 as a means of keeping track of what size key was necessary to maintain security. Currently, it’s been a common recommendation that 1024bit keys were still secure and many professional organizations have been brute-force attacking them for years. Some researchers at the University of Michigan have upended previous estimates on the security of a 1024bit key by recovering private keys from encryption hardware in a mere 104 hours. Their method involved a cluster of 81 Pentium 4s working an algorithm designed to detect error fluctuations (PDF) in calculations induced from chip faults. The process was helped along by inducing more faults within the chips by cutting the supplied voltage at key times.

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Catholic Exorcist Points Finger at Vatican - Article

VnutZ — Fri Mar 12 15:45:01 -0600 2010

You don’t often hear about the Exorcists of the Vatican, but recently Father Gabriel Amorth began pointing his finger. He’s been the chief Exorcist of the church for the past 25 years with more than 70,000 cases of possession under his belt. He insinuates the Devil having infiltrated into the Vatican with evidence being internal violence, pedophilia and other cover-ups. Amorth further goes on to describe the film The Exorcist as exaggerated, but an otherwise exact representation of the possessions he has encountered where he says all sorts of things spew forth from the victims, “Anything can come out of their mouths – finger-length pieces of iron, but also rose petals.” Naturally, his comments have not sat well with the Vatican.

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Hurt Locker vs Reality - Article

VnutZ — Mon Mar 08 09:27:32 -0600 2010

The 2010 Oscars have come and gone and the outcomes were interesting. Many people were surprised when The Hurt Locker destroyed Avatar. It was viewed as a breakthrough for women as director Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director as her film went on to more awards like Best Picture. Therein lies the question.

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Winter Olympic sports? - Poll

VnutZ — Mon Mar 08 06:02:41 -0600 2010

Cast Your Vote - Winter Olympic sports?

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A Short Look into a Phishing Email - Article

VnutZ — Sun Mar 07 13:03:11 -0600 2010

So the other day, I came out of the movie theater and checked my iPhone to see what I missed while being entertained by Alice in Wonderland. In my AKO mail was a curious looking message about North Korea having tested a missile with a nuclear detonation in Okinawa, Japan. The message indicated alerts being made for pending mobilization of military units. WTF?


Office of the Director of National Intelligence

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Cyber Security Challenges - Article

VnutZ — Sun Mar 07 06:58:13 -0600 2010

The intent to defend America’s IT infrastructure is quite old, but often even new initiatives are so mired in secrecy that nothing ends up happening. Recently, the Obama administration declassified pieces of the Bush era Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative which was an effort to make sweeping changes to America’s security posture. A subsequent congressional review of the declassified portion concluded that while the plan had areas of significant merit, the declassified pieces presented various characteristics that were at odds with itself and along with hindrances to the development of solutions. For instance, the findings state the program was too secret for its own good (essentially nobody could work on it since nobody knew about it) and that R&D should be centrally managed by a specialized agency such as DARPA rather than parceled out piecemeal to competing academic environments.

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Has the Notion of Academic Cheating Changed? - Article

VnutZ — Mon Mar 01 07:53:07 -0600 2010

I remember when cheating was easy to identify. Hidden answers for a test? Cheating. Copying another’s work (without citing)? Cheating. Working beyond time constraints? Cheating. So what is it these days that seems to make so many people justify the act? Perhaps its just the “I’m Special” generation not wanting to have anything negative associated with their persona. Maybe the Internet has made the concept of share and share alike just part of culture. Or it could be status quo and this is simply the modern evolution of yesterday’s cheater.

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Have you cheated (academics, work, etc.) to get ahead? - Poll

VnutZ — Mon Mar 01 04:36:03 -0600 2010

Cast Your Vote - Have you cheated (academics, work, etc.) to get ahead?

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Recent Hacking News - Article

VnutZ — Sat Feb 27 08:08:31 -0600 2010

So in recent news, the United States was ‘p0wned’ by itself during a virtual cyber-attack exercise. The outcome more or less showed we have quite a journey ahead of us to properly prepare politically … and technically. The latter is mentioned not so much in that our CNO (Computer Network Operations) is in question but rather the vulnerabilities to require us to have a CNO response in the first place. Mitre and SANS together have assembled the 2010 enumeration of common weaknesses in programming, a list that seems to change very little over the years showing how systemic many of the problems really are. For example, the list is still peppered with buffer overruns, improper bounding and type overflows amongst a slew of web vulnerabilities.

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Mock Cyber Attack Exercise - Article

VnutZ — Fri Feb 26 07:18:53 -0600 2010

A Washington DC area non-profit organization known as the Bipartisan Policy Center recently hosted an exercise called Cyber ShockWave. Developed by Michael Hayden (former director of the NSA and CIA), it intended to allow participants to experience a simulated, nation-wide cyber attack to role-play how the US might respond. Notable folks such as Michael Chertoff, John Negroponte, Fran Townsend and Joe Lockhart participated, indicative that the role players were experienced in the positions and not amateur think-tank employees speculating. As was likely predicted whenever political talking heads put their minds together, the US failed. In a nutshell, the attack began with malware on the cellular network through widespread phishing followed by the loss of some pipelines and eventually the east coast power grid. While the exercise showed a failure of America’s public capabilities, it was successful in opening eyes regarding how an adherence to existing authorities, jurisdictions and policies were the equivalent of American stepping all over its poncho while running at full speed, a glorious Washington DC faceplant. Amongst the questions raised were:

whether private communications companies would even comply with government requests to use their infrastructure in defensive and offensive ways

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Laptop Monitoring by Pennsylvania - Article

VnutZ — Wed Feb 24 19:46:25 -0600 2010

So in recent times, the Lower Merion School District or Pennsylvania issued Apple laptops to its high school students. What nobody knew, was the laptops came installed with software for remotely (and covertly) enabling the built-in webcams for monitoring student behavior. The matter came to light when the vice principal disciplined one student using a photo from the webcam showing activity at from their residence. Naturally this stirred all sorts of privacy controversy which led to the superintendent issuing a response stating the technology was intended to be used for recovering stolen school property in the event of a loss. Everything is winding into a class action lawsuit with both sides vigorously defending their positions. In the meantime, a federal judge has ordered the school to cease and desist all use of the remote monitoring software until a decision is made while the FBI conducts its investigation.

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Most Irritating User - Poll

VnutZ — Mon Feb 15 04:59:02 -0600 2010

Cast Your Vote - Most Irritating User

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Legalizing medical marijuana? - Poll

VnutZ — Mon Feb 08 04:40:30 -0600 2010

Cast Your Vote - Legalizing medical marijuana?

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Obama's first year in office? - Poll

VnutZ — Mon Jan 25 04:35:40 -0600 2010

Cast Your Vote - Obama's first year in office?

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